Animal Ethics

Contractualism and the Claim That Animals Have No Moral Status

According to some moral theories, animals lack moral status. Animal pain or suffering, as such, does not matter morally unless it has some impact [Page 47]on creatures that do have moral status. A well-known and influential moral theory that has this implication is contractualism. According to contractualism, morality can be understood as a contract between rational creatures who can accept and abide by the terms of the contract. Because most (perhaps all) animals cannot make and choose to fulfill contracts, they neither possess moral responsibilities nor have moral status themselves. Eating animals, experimenting on them, even torturing them for fun is morally acceptable, considering the impact on the animals alone. Contractualism has been defended recently by T. M. Scanlon and, with specific reference to the moral status of animals, by Peter Carruthers.

Of course many contractualists do not believe that torturing animals for fun is morally acceptable, and they can offer a number of explanations why it is wrong, namely, that it has implications for the treatment of people, who do have moral status. First, some animals (such as farm animals and pets) are owned by people, and it is wrong to damage their property. Second, torturing animals for fun may be bad for your character. By doing so, you will become callous and cruel and more likely in the future to torture people, which would matter morally.

From the contractualist perspective, these are genuine reasons not to harm animals, but they are not very strong. Many animals do not belong to people, and it may be that harming animals has only a weak or even negative correlation with harming people (e.g., taking out your frustration on the cat may make you less likely to take it out on your child, in which case you would have reasons for harming the cat, according to contractualism).

Moreover, contractualists, who insist that rationality and the ability to make and to decide to fulfill contracts are essential to moral status, are faced with a dilemma. Some humans are not rational; some have mental capacities similar to or even lower than many animals. Either contractualists must accept that these humans have no moral status, or they must explain why these humans have moral status, but animals with the same or greater mental capacities do not. Contractualists have struggled to give a credible answer to this dilemma. This has led one prominent contractualist, Scanlon, to suggest that contractualism is not an account of the whole of morality. Scanlon suggests that an important part of morality, “what we owe to each other” is contractualist, but there is also “morality in the broad sense,” which includes moral reasons not to harm animals or to cause them unnecessary suffering and which is not contractualist at its basis.

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